Alfred and Kitty Stieglitz

1907

Alfred Stieglitz

Artist, American, 1864 - 1946

Edward Steichen

Artist, American, 1879 - 1973

Media Options

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Artwork overview

  • Medium

    Autochrome

  • Credit Line

    Alfred Stieglitz Collection

  • Dimensions

    image: 11.3 × 16.5 cm (4 7/16 × 6 1/2 in.)
    overall: 12.9 × 18 cm (5 1/16 × 7 1/16 in.)

  • Accession

    1949.3.290

  • Key Set Number

    315

Alfred Stieglitz

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Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Georgia O'Keeffe; gift to NGA, 1949.

Associated Names

Bibliography

2002

  • Greenough, Sarah. Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Photographs. Washington, 2002: vol. 1, cat. 315.

Wikidata ID

Q64037906

Scholarly Remarks and Key Set Data

Remarks

This Autochrome was made in the Bavarian resort town of Tutzing, Austria, in the summer of 1907, by either Edward Steichen or Stieglitz, or possibly both. Stieglitz, Steichen, Frank Eugene, and Heinrich Kühn were experimenting with the newly invented Autochrome, the first viable and commercially manufactured color process. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has an Autochrome of Kitty made at the same time, attributed to Edward Steichen (see Weston Naef, The Collection of Alfred Stieglitz [New York, 1978], 468, no. 516).

In “The New Color Photography,” Camera Work 20 (October 1907), 25, Stieglitz wrote that as he sailed back from Europe on the Kaiser Wilhelm II in the fall of 1907 he “experienced the marvellous sensation within the space of an hour of marconigraphing from mid-ocean; of listening to the Welte-Mignon piano which reproduces automatically and perfectly the playing of any pianist . . . and of looking at those unbelievable color photographs! How easily we learn to live on former visions!”


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